The Details: Leaning Tower has two locations in the Minneapolis area, one at 25th and University Ave SE just east of the University of Minnesota (it's actually located in one of the ends of one of the campus-run apartments) and one location in Uptown. I cannot speak for the one in Uptown as I have never been there, but the one on University has a full bar with what looked like some nice selections, though I've only gone there for carry-out pizza. They do have some outside seating at the University location, though now that we're almost through October that shouldn't really be used until late spring... (Gotta love Minnesota winters.)
The Pizza: Unfortunately, I don't have any crappy cell phone-camera pictures for you guys, so this review will be all text (sorry)!
Leaning Tower offers a small 10" pizza, as well as a large 14", no medium which is fine because if you are pretty hungry two people can knock out a 14" pretty quick, if not starving it should feed three normal people. The first pizza we got was just plain sausage, I won't dig too deeply into this, but if you want sausage, get it with some other things on the pizza as well. It seams to me that they use ground beef instead of a standard italian sausage, which is fine... just don't expect it to have too much spicing/flavoring. The crust is pretty good, nothing to write home about but does not take away from the pizza. Luckily where they strive is their toppings as well as their sauce... The sauce very good by itself and has some nice seasoning to it, it's not just plain crushed tomato's, +1 from me. The most recent pizza had a pretty good amount of cheese almost to the point where it was a bit hard to work with, but that did allow me to teach my roommate some plate "techniques" to not make a mess of the slice you are trying to get... (more on this in a later post maybe?).
The second time we ordered as said above we got the "leaning tower" specialty pizza which comes with sausage, pepperoni, celery, onions, and green peppers. All of the toppings tasted very fresh and cooked perfectly, everything was cooked enough but the veggies still had a nice fresh crunch to them. The sausage and pepperoni goes very well together, the pepperoni offers the spices desired from the sausage.
Finally, their price point.... most of the specialty large pizza's are $18.00 before tax, leaving you around $20 out the door... While I understand that we are not in Chicagoland, back home 20.00 will get you within change found on the floor of your car to a large Lou's deep dish sausage pizza, a pizza that will not only be the best pizza you've ever had, but will also feed 4 hungry people. Because of this, and the fact that they are slacking a bit on the plain sausage and their crust isn't extremely unique, I am giving Leaning Tower Pizza a 5/10. I will most likely be back as it is a 3 minute walk from my apartment and it is better than papa johns or domino's to me, but the price is a bit of a turn-off.
5/10
